Saturday, 10 May 2014

YouTubeCentre Plugin for YouTube on X1000

Today I want to take a look at the YouTubeCentre plugin for the Odyssey 1.23r3 web browser on the AmigaOne X1000. Also taking a quick look at LiveForIt Mplayer and Mplayer GUI.

The YouTubeCentre plugin is an extremely flexible control plugin for the YouTube.com website, to allow you to customise how you want to view YouTube videos and all the associated settings, including downloading the videos, removing ads, repeat functionality, lights on/off, removing end screen on videos, not displaying overlay during videos and much more too!

I want to sincerely thank user Boot_WB from the Amigaworld.net forums for letting me know about this plugin!

The YouTubeCentre plugin is not included as part of the Odyssey 1.23r3 web browser, but from my testing appears to work quite well with it.

If you don't have it already, Odyssey 1.23r3 is recently released on AmigaOS4.1.6 and is available from os4depot.net. I already took a look at this 1.23r2 version of Odyssey recently in this blog entry, so I won't repeat myself covering that material.

In my case, when I installed the upgraded version of Odyssey, I didn't install it over the top of the old version. Instead I renamed the old version folder to Odyssey.old, and then installed 1.23r3 as a fresh install.

To download, right click on YouTubeCentre.user.js and save it into the Odyssey's Scripts folder, located within the Odyssey folder - wherever you installed Odyssey on your computer.

Having done this, I then closed Odyssey, reopened it and browsed to YouTube.com:

I then went right clicked on the top of the AmigaOS4.1.6 screen to access the Odyssey Menu, and highlighted Windows and then select the option in the menu that appears called Scripts... which then open the Scripts window as below:

As you can see, it is empty. Click on Add button, and it should automatically take you to the Scripts directory to choose from a number of scripts. Avoid the YouTube.js and YouTube_EZDownload.js, and select all the others (one at a time - click Add button to add more until done):

Once all installed the Scripts window should look like this:

Note that the YouTube Fullscreen Fix currently does not work under AmigaOS4.

Make sure each script is set to be enabled. Then close the window in top left corner, and restart Odyssey.

Then go to YouTube.com again - now you will get a prompt from the YouTubeCentre plugin, which has run because you went to YouTube.com, and is asking to be configured:

There are a lot of settings to configure here, a sample is included below to give you an idea how granular the settings are in YouTubeCentre:

When you change settings they are saved automatically. Click on the close gadget in the top right when done.

I then viewed a YouTube video which worked perfectly. No need anymore to use HTML5 mode in YouTube, or to spoof the browser as an ipad to get it to play correctly:

Fantastic! Above you can see the extra bar that YouTubeCentre adds below the YouTube video to allow you to download the video (and choose the resolution), repeat the video, lights on/off (darken the background), Resize the video display and alter the aspect ratio:

When you activate the lights off mode, it changes the background like below, to make it easier to view the video without the distractions around the video itself:

I then used the Download option below the video, to download the video from YouTube as a 720p video:

Odyssey then prompts me to save it somewhere:

Odyssey thens shows the download in progress:

While I was waiting for this to download, I wanted to show some of the YouTubeCentre menus in the bar below the playback screen of any video, while browsing YouTube.com - here is the Resize Menu:

This is the Aspect Ratio Menu:

And here is some more of the YouTubeCentre plugin settings - General Options:

Player settings - you can remove the end screen automatically, and watermarks, branding banners and so on - wonderful:

In the Player menu you can also set the default resolution for playback. My ADSL connection is not great so I use 360p for default:

Under download options you can specify the default download resolution and format:

I have to say this YouTubeCentre is very impressive - much thanks to the author YePpHa below:

Once the video had downloaded, I then fired up the newest LiveForIt Mplayer software and MPlayerGUI (by Denil 715) from os4depot.net to play it:

I initially set full screen under the Video tab (as below), but for some reason it uses my 9250 card to display rather than the Radeon HD, so I set it back to Window mode. Make sure video output is using cgxwpa for best playback:

I then hit Play and it played back perfectly in 720p in Mplayer - no skips or audio sync issues - very happy:

And here it is while playing back on the AmigaOS4.1.6 screen (click to expand):

I also recorded the playback via YouTube in two videos if you would like to see how it runs on the X1000. I recorded these on iphone and uploaded at low quality rather than full quality - sorry in advance:

YouTubeCentre, Odyssey 1.23r3 and LiveForIt Mplayer are all excellent and I recommend installing them and trying them out for yourself on your X1000!

3 comments:

Great stuff! Hey, how can I re-access the YoutubeCentre script so I can adjust some settings. Don't like how video is so large and want default to be smaller player. No idea how to re-launch this settings screen you show above. Thx TJ